It's the end of the world as we know it........

Thank you Michael Stipe and REM for the title today.

Yes, it's the fateful day tomorrow; all the hype concerning the end of the long Mayan calender will finally be over on Saturday and we can all go back to dealing with the petty and tiny exigencies of this life.....until the next time some crank formulates a theory based on wobbly 'science', blind faith and some degree of mental inbalance.

Quite clearly, no-one believes a word of this and yet some people do! The ubiquity of the internet and the world-wide-web among developed, and some undeveloped, nations ensures that there will be a rapid and extensive circulation of 'crackpot' ideas, especially if the mainstream media, who should know better, join in the fairy-tale circus in the hope of boosting circulation, or hits to the website, from the gullible, intensely stupid or just the stark staring bonkers members in every community.

One of the great joys about the internet is the complete lack of control by Governments, Corporations or any other agency solely concerned with their own self interest; it is one of the first, probably THE first example of true 'free speech' in civilisation's history and yet it comes with such a heavy price. There is no requirement on the contents of the web for facts, for evidence-based research, even anecdotal-evidence-based research and any damn fool, even me, can write whatever they want and have it accessible from around the globe in seconds.

It is a common misconception that Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding father of the American Nation, once said; "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." This is almost certainly untrue. The earliest recorded and researched example which I can find of such an idea comes from a speech made by John Philpot Curran, in a speech on the 'Rights of election' in 1790 in which he said: "It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." And yet it is not only eternal vigilance that must be maintained if our essential freedoms, including the right to free and open speech, are to be perserved. We must act on the outcomes of that vigilance.

If we do not speak out when crazy and insane ideas become accepted as 'fact' or 'informed speculation' then we are passively contributing to the dissemination of ideas for which there is no substance whether of a scientific, moral or philosophical basis whatsoever.

I was reminded of this by a short piece which dealt with Mayan calender anxiety in children, yes children. Anyone who remembers the 1960's and, inter alia, the Cuban Missile Crisis, will recall the widespead anxiety over the very real prospect of an impending nuclear holocaust; have little doubt, the threat was very real and Kennedy's and Kruschev's brinkmanship was some of the most alarming examples of such diplomacy, or lack of it, in the history of the planet. Children as well as adults in the West and the Soviet Union were rightly concerned; the missiles were on their way, albeit by ship. The Mayan Calender syndrome is simply a result of an inability to apply even a modicum of critical thinking to the issue and then inculcating naive children with the same unfounded ideas.

This might, at an extreme stretch of the imagination, bear some scrutiny if we all adhered to the Mayan religion or had complete confidence in the abilities of the Mayans' astronomy, in the complete absence of telescopes, but we don't! We give crendence to the Mayans' idea only in so far as they accord, in the main, with our own 21st century ideas.

In the end, Saturday will come, just as the world didn't end in the year 1,000 or 2,000 and just like the day after the notional coming of the 'Rapture' came;  all of the usual excuses will be made by those that have metaphorical egg on their faces. The question is: how do you prevent people believing such unsubstantiated nonsense? Clearly education is the key but how do you get the horse to drink even after you have thrust its snout into the stream!